


violent bear it away

by sunbean72



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, i don't ship them okay, it's an airplane reference nevermind, not a buh a bomb, they should have been friends at least tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2020-11-08 18:56:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20840381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbean72/pseuds/sunbean72
Summary: Tony's AWOL and steve realizes there's something terribly wrong aka bomb defusing trope that no one asked for





	violent bear it away

**Author's Note:**

> idek what this is, probably some kind of AU but MCU I just wanted to write a bomb defusing scene between these two. i originally started it with an injured tony defusing a bomb on steve but i just wanted a fic where steve risked something for tony for once.

“Tony? Tony… I’m coming in.” Steve shouldered against the locked door when there was no answer and when the lock didn’t give easily he used his strength, snapping the metal lock and scanning the room. At first he couldn’t see Tony in the dim room, the only light from the city lights through the high windows, and his heart beat painfully fast; could it be Tony’d already—?

He spotted Tony’s legs, just visible past a wall, slightly askew as if he’d fallen and Steve ran over quickly. Tony was injured, there was a pool of blood on the floor. “Tony!”

The sight of a barrel of a gun leveled at him brought him up short. Shocked that Tony was holding a gun on him, Steve automatically froze. “I told you to stay clear. I told Coulson to keep everyone out of here. He promised me, the bastard,” Tony said bitterly.

“He did. He kept Natasha out, and Bruce.” Steve had his hands up as if Tony were a wild animal instead of one of his best friends. “He probably couldn’t have stopped Bruce but he was starting to turn green so he had to back down. He didn’t want to. And I know you told me to stay clear; that's how I knew to come.” Steve moved slightly and Tony held up his hand, his face angry, intimidating.

“Stay where you are,” he warned. Steve felt a chill; he didn’t believe Tony would hurt him, but the voice he used was the cold iron steel of Iron Man. Tony reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a jump drive, throwing it to Steve. “This is all the info I have on the man who did this to me, I forgot to give it to Coulson. Find him and stop him. Now get out of here, Rogers.” He turned his face away.

Steve took a step forward and Tony’s head snapped back in his direction and Steve heard the gun cock. He put his hands down, giving Tony a dirty look. “What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

“If I have to,” Tony said indifferently. “I don’t have to kill you, just keep you from following me. I’d rather not spend my last few moments on earth crawling away, so I’d much prefer it if you left now.”

“Let me help you!”

“You can’t! Don’t you think I’ve tried? Don’t you think if it were possible I would have figured it out? Even Coulson agreed. The only thing I can do is try to mitigate the casualties. Evacuate. That means get out! There’s not much time.”

“How much time?”

Tony closed his eyes, and Steve took the opportunity to run to the injured man, kneeling beside him. Tony opened his eyes and again raised the gun. Steve set his mouth into a stubborn line. “If you’re going to shoot me, just do it Stark. I’m not going to leave you. So put the gun down and stop wasting time!”

Tony looked as if he really were going to shoot him for a moment, the icy coldness in his normally warm brown eyes making him almost unrecognizable, a different man. But then tears started, thawing the icy indifference as Tony’s mask fell. He dropped his hand, the gun clattering to the floor.

Steve instantly started unbuttoning Tony’s shirt to access the bomb strapped to his chest. The arc reactor flooded them with its bright and clear, pure light. “Tell me what you know.”

“He wired this to a capacitor based trigger,” Tony said, his voice low and just shy of shaking. “If I remove it, it goes off. If I try to disable it, it may go off. This tech… if I had JARVIS, maybe. If I had time. But I don’t, Steve. You still do. Less than five minutes.”

His stoicism stumbled over the words and his voice cracked slightly, and Tony reached over and grabbed Steve’s hand as he was still fumbling with the bomb. Steve looked up into Tony’s anguished face. “You still have some time. Steve. Please. I don’t want you to die with me.”

“Do you have a light? Any tools?” The timer was counting relentlessly down and it did look… complicated. Steve’s usual manner of dealing with something complicated was hit it as hard as he could, but in this case it didn’t seem to be an option.

Tony wiped his face, gesturing. A set of intricate tools that Tony used for the finer points of working on the delicate inner workings of the armor lay nearby. Steve pulled them closer then started taking a closer look at the device.

“Could we get more light?”

“Not here. This part of the Tower isn’t wired for emergency light.”

“Why’d you come here then?”

“Least amount of structural damage due to the earthquake proof foundations. I didn’t want anyone— “

“Anyone else to get hurt, I know,” Steve murmured. He tried to calm his thoughts, calm his breathing. If he didn’t figure out something that Tony Stark, one of the smartest men on the planet, couldn’t figure out in the next couple of minutes, there was a good chance they were both going to wind up dead.

Tony held his breath to minimize motion as Steve was trying to look at it. “Is this what was going to be used to charge the capacitor?” Tony nodded, raising his eyebrows.

“But you can’t get to the wire without removing it.”

Steve moved carefully, carefully. He knew if Coulson had left, and Tony had given up, his chances were next to nothing. But next to nothing was not nothing. “Nitrous?”

“What?”

“Could we freeze the trigger?”

“I don’t know this tech, Steve. That would probably set it off. See this?” He pointed. “Nitrous would buy us time but not stop the current. It would destabilize the electron resistance field.”

“All right.” There were now less than three minutes on the countdown timer, which seemed to be going incredibly fast. He could feel the tension and pain and anxiety rolling off of Tony in waves.

“What about the battery?”

There was a moment’s pause. “What?”

“The battery… it has to have a power source to charge the capacitor, right? Is it accessible?”

“I… I didn’t think of… It might be. I can’t see from this angle. The battery is usually deep in the device, protected. But. If we can remove this— “

Steve worked quickly, his hand steady. He carefully removed a portion of the outer cover near where Tony supposed the battery would have to be. He uncovered the battery with less than a minute left of the timer and as he was reaching for it, Tony grabbed his wrist.

“In case it doesn’t work. Get under that desk, behind that wall.”

“Tony that won’t—“

“Please Steve!” But Steve was deaf to his plea. Somehow he had it in his mind that if Tony was going to die, it wasn’t going to be alone. It was stupid, it was so stupid, but there it was, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t leave him and when Tony saw that, Steve saw true fear flash through his face and then he reached down and plucked the battery out with a pair of tweezers.

The clock went dark.

They held their breath, moment’s passing, and then still passing past the time when the bomb would have gone off and the both of them collapsed into each other under the weight of their relief, the crash of the adrenaline. Steve held Tony tightly, as if his grip were the thing keeping him here. He admitted to himself he couldn’t lose his friend, he’d come to mean as much to Steve as Bucky, as Peggy, as family meant.

Tony was pushing him away and just as Steve was giving him a triumphant grin, Tony socked him right in the face.

Shocked more than injured, as Tony was weak from blood loss and injury, Steve gave Tony an indignant look. “What the hell was that for? Saving your life?”

“You damn idiot it was for staying with me when I was removing the battery! I couldn’t strangle you right now! I’ve never been so terrified in my entire life!”

Steve had the decency to feel a little sheepish; it had been foolish in the extreme to not take cover once they’d decided to remove the battery. But he didn’t regret it. Tony always felt a bit ill-at-ease on the team; he always said he was the least heroic of them all, didn’t belong, was only of real value for the monetary contribution he could make. The others always disputed that with him, but Steve hoped that he’d inadvertently offered Tony concrete proof of how much he was valued and cared for.

He rubbed his cheek, glaring at the golden Avenger. “Well if you weren’t already bleeding, I’d make sure and return the favor. Why didn’t you tell me when you were receiving threats, Tony?”

“It was my past, Steve, catching up with me. It didn’t concern you, or the other Avengers. I thought I could handle it.”

“Everything about you concerns me,” Steve said sarcastically. “Especially your mental state. You shouldn’t have kept it a secret. And what exactly was with the gun?"

Tony hated guns.

"Nat left it lying around. I thought... about using it. On myself. I'm a coward. I didn't want to die getting, getting blown up. I was afraid."

"You're not a coward."

There was a pause between them.

“All right,” Tony said. “Are you just going to lecture me, saving me from a bomb so I can bleed to death?"

“How bad is it?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t had a chance to worry about it, but I think… um. I think I’ve lost a lot of blood. It… it hurts. I'm definitely blaming not thinking of the battery on the blood loss, by the way.”

“Well, sometimes you geniuses overthink these things. Can you walk?”

“I don’t—I think no. I tried but the pain… I could try.”

“All right tough guy, I’m your hero today. I’ll get you up the stairs to a room with emergency power and we call an ambulance.”

“Steve!” Tony protested but Steve picked him up easily, his weight no challenge at all for Steve’s super strength. Tony looked mulish and sulky, but also the movement had made him pale and slightly gray.

“It’s all right,” Steve said softly. “Hang in there Tony.”

Taught with pain and tension, at his words he could feel the beleaguered man relax. Despite his joking words, for a moment, Steve really did feel like a hero.

He carried Tony up the stairs.


End file.
